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On 16 November 2016 the web site Winning Democrats published an article implying that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was seeking a personal presidential pardon from Donald Trump as recompense for [s]abotaging Clinton]: As Breitbart correctly noted, WikiLeaks has already been negotiating with American authorities for several years with respect to the organization's operations. On 19 August 2012, Assange issued a formal statement from the Ecuadorean Embassy in which he implored President Obama that: (Assange currently resides at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after seeking asylum from that country and is wanted by Swedish authorities over allegations of sexual assault, so he would not necessarily escape legal troubles personally if he were pardoned by the U.S. president.) In November 2010, the Program in Law and Journalism at New York Law School blog Legal As She Is Spoke argued WikiLeaks (and by extension, Assange) had committed no crime for publishing leaked documents pertaining to the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The piece stood in stark relief to items published in 2016 decrying WikiLeaks for its activity: Slate published an editorial titled Why I Love WikiLeaks on 30 November 2010 that lauded the site for shock[ing] us out of [] complacency, again with a tenor absent from coverage of the platform during the 2016 election: We contacted WikiLeaks' Task Force, a subset of the organization dedicated to ensuring accuracy in reporting about the platform's activities. A volunteer with whom we spoke confirmed that WikiLeaks had beseeched the Obama administration for many years to cease investigating their activities and to pardon whistleblowers, adding that the organization publishes without [favor] and would never release or withhold information based upon the possibility of favorable treatment from any state or entity.
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